Aliens in Upper Bavaria
Aliens in Upper Bavaria
“Where did the Bavarians come from? This question alone is problematic, because we still don’t know “where” they came from.”
Friedrich Prinz, The History of Bavaria
“However, the question of who these “people from Baiaheim” were and where this country of origin may have been remains unanswered.”
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Wilhelm Volkert, History of Bavaria
“In our written sources, at any rate, the Bavarians appear quite abruptly around 550… Otherwise, however, the testimonies are all silent, and all that remains is the mysterious twilight that surrounds the beginnings of all ethnicities.”
Benno Hubensteiner, Bavarian History
“For that territory of the Suebi has the Bavarians to the east, the Franks to the west, the Burgundians to the south, the Thuringians to the north; the Suebi were then attached to the Alamanni”
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Jordanes, History of the Goths, about 551 / 552
“It’s as if they had fallen from the sky.”
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Gotthilf Müller, The Bavarian Big Bang
Bavarian impressions
The so-called “Schuhplatteln”: Homeland care or ancient, extraterrestrial rite?
Producer: Carolin Dassel
Screenplay development funding from the Filmförderungsanstalt (FFA)
Screenplay funding for the new version by the FilmFernsehFonds Bayern (FFF)
Story
Stefan and Benedikt are the next hot YouTube stars. On their comedy channel “Der Mähdrescher”, they spin the absurdities of everyday Bavarian life week after week. One day, they anonymously receive a real scoop for their next show: a Bavarian history book in which the historian Gotthilf Müller links the origins of Bavarian history with UFOs. Stefan and Benedikt are electrified. They actually want to turn it into a crazy programme about UFOs – but they soon realise that there is more to the story. Gotthilf claims that his son has disappeared through a part of an old Bavarian UFO. This could be dismissed as the ravings of an old man – but there are powerful forces that want to cover up his son’s disappearance. Is it really possible that a 1500-year-old UFO is hidden in Bavaria? And if so, why has no trace of it been found so far?
Stefan and Benedikt uncover a mystery bigger and more bizarre than they could have imagined in their wildest dreams.
The Aliens are my personal declaration of love for Bavaria
Making of
The little X-Files parody “Exploded” was the first time I entered the world of Bavarian aliens. The film was very controversial at film school, my professor didn’t really get it and wanted to have it cut completely, his assistant took the same line, it was a crazy fight. The film finally premiered in Hof. Festival director Badewitz aka “Der Heinz” liked it very much and took it out of the short film programmes and showed it as a supporting film to Lars Becker’s all-star comedy “Das Gelbe vom Ei”. Suddenly the film was word-of-mouth in Hof, the auditorium was packed, everyone wanted to see it – and when the farmers negotiated with the aliens for the first time in their deep Bavarian, people went crazy, the auditorium laughed so hard that whole passages of dialogue were no longer intelligible. Lars Becker came up to me after the performance and said “1:0 for Upper Bavaria”.
Ever since this premiere, I’ve had a great desire to send BND special agent Frank Müller on another journey through extraterrestrial Bavaria. But it wasn’t until I moved to Berlin and kept a safe distance from all the aliens that the penny dropped as to how I could tell the story: to be precise, it dropped when I was studying Bavarian history books. The Bavarian historians there admit quite openly that they really don’t know where the Bavarians come from (see the quotes on the left). They do know that the Bavarians, unlike the Swabians, Alemanni and Saxons, did not take part in the migration of peoples, but nobody knows exactly how the Bavarians came to Bavaria. In one of the books I found the decisive sentence: “It’s as if they had fallen from the sky”. “Aliens in Upper Bavaria” tells the story that it was exactly like that.
My secret hope was always that one day I would be taken by the Guglmännern to the basement of Munich’s town hall, where they would open a steel hatch leading into the belly of the spaceship Bavaria. In order to finally be able to tell this claim to realism, we made the move to found footage film this year and, in collaboration with the screenwriter Lasse Nolte, made the project significantly smaller, more documentary, younger and more emotional. Thanks to the documentary approach, the project now finally has the impact that we can credibly say that the Bavarians are not of this world.
Will I ever be able to reveal the secret of Bavaria together with my producer Carolin Dassel? The second round of financing is currently underway. The next update will hopefully come from the basement of Munich City Hall…
